New-Tech Europe | April 2018

Mellanox LinkX® Cables and Transceivers Powers Next Generation Data Centers Interconnects

Brad Smith, Mellanox Technologies

Introduction Mellanox is a leader in designing and manufacturing complete end- to-end data center networking systems, including Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters, switches, multi- core processors and the cables and transceivers linking them together forming a complete end-to-end system. With the advent of the rise of everything connected to the Internet and incredibly powerful smartphones shipped worldwide in billions of units per year, the impact on the once sleepy data center has been tremendous. The world of data we are all living in, drives the need to collect and analyze growing amounts of data. The data center is nowadays the competitive advantage for many companies for developing products, provide services and enhancing research. On the near horizon are 5G wireless

networks that promise to deliver 10Gb/s to nearly everywhere along with augmented reality, deep learning and artificial intelligence promises enormous changes in the next few years. Smartphones now exceed the capabilities of a PC from only a few years ago and now have the capability shoot cat videos in 4K resolution and text it to a hundred of your closest friends. This means the data center infrastructure had to arise from a snail’s pace of system upgrades every 5+ years to now upgrading at a break neck pace of every 2-3 years. To illustrate, from 2005-2015, 1G/10G copper (CAT-5e) cables and 10G/40G optical transceivers satisfied most data center networks. Mellanox introduced 25G/100G in 2016 and began shipping in volume in 2017. Last year, Mellanox introduced 200G Ethernet switches, adapters and interconnects and now 400G is all the industry’s rage for the

next generation networks being built next year! As computing tasks continue to migrate out of enterprise data centers to cloud service providers offering better economics, these “hyperscale” companies are building enormous data centers the size of football stadiums. At 400G beginning in hyperscale accounts in 2019, the standard enterprise data center will be two generations of interconnect speeds behind! Mellanox LinkX Cables and Transceivers All the data flowing over the Internet ends up going into a data center over an optical network and ends up at a system rack with top-of-rack switches linked via smart network adapters to storage and servers where the data is processed. Data center links typically use 1-channel SFP and 4-channel QSFP form-factors for the connector/

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